Terrestrial to Satellite Communications Using Multi-antenna Relays Nodes

Satellite communications and relaying techniques have been receiving the attention of the research community over the last years. This paper proposes a terrestrial to satellite communication system aided by terrestrial relay nodes to facilitate a robust, reliable, and efficient communication link and improve the spectral efficiency. In particular, this paper concentrates on evaluating the spectral efficiency and bit error rate (BER) performance of terrestrial to satellite multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) amplify and forward (AF) relay links. Zero Forcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) multiantenna decoding techniques are employed, which have been well established in terrestrial wireless communications. Numerical results are provided to quantify the performance gain of the proposed communication system. Keywords–Amplify and forward (AF) relaying; Loo distribution; minimum mean square error (MMSE; multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) techniques; satellite communications; Zero Forcing (ZF).